Starfield Thread - now with Shattered Space horror expansion

[Butter]

Piece of shit is on 33% sale at steam at the moment until Thursday.

I wouldn't, even with your money.

 

[Moink]

I got it for free with my CPU and I still feel like I got ripped off.

 

[Konjad]

Is this game worth getting, at all? Serious question, from someone who loved Morrowind and legitimately had a good time in Skyrim, at least for a while.

There are fates worse than lobotomy, but does it mean you should lobotomize yourself?

If you are still uncertain, look at Vic

 

[Fedora Master]

This is probably the biggest waste of HD space since Dragon Age 2.

 

[ArchAngel]

I got it for free with my CPU and I still feel like I got ripped off.

Of course when it overheated your CPU and still had crap graphics.

 

[Rhobar121]

This is probably the biggest waste of HD space since Dragon Age 2.

Without exaggeration, DA2 wasn't even half as bad.

 

[Peachcurl]

"this turd tastes much better than this other turd"

Why do we have to do this, bros.

 

[Losus4]

Bethesda have no idea why people like their games. No one likes their main quests, their games are all about the life-sim elements, and the best thing Bethesda can do to facilite this is simply get out of the player's way. Instead they force the player into scripted, narrative-heavy scenes.

Imagine how much better Starfield would've been if the moment the player clicks "New Game" you are immediately dropped onto a random planet, in some random outpost, with some basic gear based on the class you chose. That's it. No forced dialogue or cutscenes or exposition. Just free to play and explore at your own leisure. You can choose to travel to a nearby space station or city to discover the world and main quest, or you could simply stay at the spot the game dumped you at the start and simply live out your character on that planet.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Bethesda have no idea why people like their games. No one likes their main quests, their games are all about the life-sim elements, and the best thing Bethesda can do to facilite this is simply get out of the player's way. Instead they force the player into scripted, narrative-heavy scenes.

Imagine how much better Starfield would've been if the moment the player clicks "New Game" you are immediately dropped onto a random planet, in some random outpost, with some basic gear based on the class you chose. That's it. No forced dialogue or cutscenes or exposition. Just free to play and explore at your own leisure. You can choose to travel to a nearby space station or city to discover the world and main quest, or you could simply stay at the spot the game dumped you at the start and simply live out your character on that planet.

This is so true. I've enjoyed Bethsoft games at times. I've never beaten any of the MQs. I've also barely finished any other questlines either. I think I finished a few guilds in Oblivion way back when, but that's about it. Usually I just wander around, adventuring and tooling around until I get bored.

 

[Ravielsk]

This is so true. I've enjoyed Bethsoft games at times. I've never beaten any of the MQs. I've also barely finished any other questlines either. I think I finished a few guilds in Oblivion way back when, but that's about it. Usually I just wander around, adventuring and tooling around until I get bored.

Agreed. The problem with Bethesda is that they do not understand that there has to be a meaningful difference between the player just randomly dungeon diving and the main quest(s). And that difference has to be there from start to finish, not just in some sporadic bursts at the start and end.

 

[gurugeorge]

Bethesda have no idea why people like their games. No one likes their main quests, their games are all about the life-sim elements, and the best thing Bethesda can do to facilite this is simply get out of the player's way. Instead they force the player into scripted, narrative-heavy scenes.

Imagine how much better Starfield would've been if the moment the player clicks "New Game" you are immediately dropped onto a random planet, in some random outpost, with some basic gear based on the class you chose. That's it. No forced dialogue or cutscenes or exposition. Just free to play and explore at your own leisure. You can choose to travel to a nearby space station or city to discover the world and main quest, or you could simply stay at the spot the game dumped you at the start and simply live out your character on that planet.

This is so true. I've enjoyed Bethsoft games at times. I've never beaten any of the MQs. I've also barely finished any other questlines either. I think I finished a few guilds in Oblivion way back when, but that's about it. Usually I just wander around, adventuring and tooling around until I get bored.

Has anybody ever, in the whole history of man, finished a Bethesda MQ? :D

Me neither. Even with Fallout 4, I found it to be quite enjoyable when I had the mod that made the MQ optional, and I just pottered about doing side-quests with one of those mods that put a whole lot of "interesting NPCs" into the game. The most memorable thing was escorting a sentient zombie from that mod, from one end of the map to the other, through all sorts of emergent trials and tribulations.

There's something kind of "weightless" about the MQ lines in Bethesda games. Some of the side-quests they do are great, but there's something about the way the games are set up that makes the whole idea of an MQ kind of weirdly inappropriate. You want to "make your own story" in their games, not follow some over-arching narrative. Then they work quite well as RPGs (or do, once you mod the mechanics to be more congenial).

 

[ArchAngel]

I've finished MQ in Skyrim and Starfield. I Skyrim it was on my 2nd try. On first I ragequit the game somewhere during mage guild quest when some nasty bug appeared. I've finished MQ in Starfield because they managed to make random exploring shittier than MQ and I wanted to see how the New Game+ works in Starfield

 

[Lemming42]

With Oblivion, Fo3 and Skyrim it's really especially annoying in that you're actively punished for doing the MQ - Oblivion gates and dragons both arrive after you hit a certain point in the MQ, and both of them serve to ruin immersion and waylay the player from doing whatever it is they actually wanted to do. Refusing to engage with the MQ thus results in a better game, with the world more open for freeform exploration. Fo3 has the Enclave sweep through the wasteland after a certain point in the MQ too which has some cool reactivity with a couple of locations but is otherwise just a pointless obstacle for the player to deal with.

I wonder if they'd be wise to do entirely optional main quests in future games. There's a really cool Daggerfall Unity quest mod I played in which the player goes on a long and exciting adventure after finding an abandoned baby (it's this mod), but you can also just choose to ignore the baby and then the quest will never start and you'll never get another chance, and you can just keep roleplaying.

Emil and Todd clearly like """"epic"""" quests with high stakes and plenty of cinematic action, but I think shit like Dawnguard proves that you can do that in a non-intrusive way that isn't forced on the player.

 

[Butter]

I finished the MQ in Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, FO3, and FO4. Only in the first of those did I do it because I actually wanted to see how the story would play out. For the rest it was "Well I guess I'll do that shit now."

 

[Jvegi]

I could never find Caius Cosades (not true, but funny).

Played about 60 hours of Morrowind, 20 hours of Oblivion, 10 hours of Skyrim and 5 hours of F3. I assume there’s something I'm missing by not following the mq. I'll never know if that's true.

 

[ind33d]

I wonder what went wr...

 

[Butter]

Skyrim radicalized me by making the Nord nationalists sympathetic.

 

[Ryzer]

Skyrim radicalized me by making the Nord nationalists sympathetic.

...Until you find out that Ulfric Stormcloak is controlled by the (((thalmors)))

 

[ArchAngel]

I wonder what went wr...

Soon Guatanamo Bay will have a lot of GMs for all the islamic terrorists there.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Bethesda have no idea why people like their games. No one likes their main quests, their games are all about the life-sim elements, and the best thing Bethesda can do to facilite this is simply get out of the player's way. Instead they force the player into scripted, narrative-heavy scenes.

Imagine how much better Starfield would've been if the moment the player clicks "New Game" you are immediately dropped onto a random planet, in some random outpost, with some basic gear based on the class you chose. That's it. No forced dialogue or cutscenes or exposition. Just free to play and explore at your own leisure. You can choose to travel to a nearby space station or city to discover the world and main quest, or you could simply stay at the spot the game dumped you at the start and simply live out your character on that planet.

Starfield without a predetermined start would still lack an Open World (aside from procedurally-generated wastelands), still not offer the player anything to do in space other than combat (which is worse than that found in Spaceborne, created by a single person), and still be more of a 'looter-shooter' than an RPG. Not even the same type of game that established the phenomenal success of Bethesda Softworks starting with Morrowind in 2002, and not even rising to the level of quality found in Morrowind's lackluster successors.

 

[kites]

If they don’t release a contiguous space to explore as a dlc/expansion soon they will really be missing the plot as a studio. They must be aware one of the main things they’re known for is exploration, and procedural generation can’t take a designer’s place -at least not yet. Sure there are some handcrafted spaces but I have zero interest if a large amount of the game is randomly generated, even as a popcorn type of game..

 

[ind33d]

Is there an Iron Man (like XCOM, not Tony Stark) mod for Starfield? I think if you really pump up the difficulty and delete your save on death the game must get better

 

[Hellraiser]

If they don’t release a contiguous space to explore as a dlc/expansion soon they will really be missing the plot as a studio.

This is beyond their ability to implement, most likely too late and too fucking costly, even if they would abstract away the scale of interplanetary distances freelancer style. I mean for fucks sake, they dropped the ball on something as simple as space piracy. The hard parts like boarding ships and fighting the other crew in enemy ship interiors are implemented (the only really good thing in this game apart from a few quests/minor locations in a sea of half-assed filler), but not only is there jack shit in supporting such a play style (for instance a black market ship buyer/fence) despite it being low effort to implement, even worse you can't scrap ships "into razors" for cash without jumping through "no fun allowed" hoops they deliberately implemented to make it uneconomical (unless they fixed this in a patch, wasn't paying attention to the changelogs). That's just straight up retarded and a red flag as far as competence goes.

A proper expansion of such kind would need to pretty much copy the basics of how the sandbox/openworld space functioned in freelancer. Random ships going on patrol or trade mission spouting radiant lines over the radio like "we are on a mission for the shitposters guild, en route to shackleford base". Being able to follow ships to find bases and outposts (maybe the the ship stealth system would be fucking useful for something besides that 1 tutorial mission that teaches you it, lol). Wrecks, hazard zones, hidden asteroid bases and stations. Finally a fucking reputation system and some kind of rewards tied into it, so that the radiant jobs from the job board actually have some purpose. Maybe even going as far as aiding factions in turf wars and territory swapping hands.

If they had a clue in the first place they would have realized that their Bethesda open world in this game is the space part, I mean for fucks sake the systems with their planets, moons and occasional hand-placed" POI are handcrafted. You should have shit like ship schedules instead of NPC schedules, bases are their houses you can raid/rob etc. in it. Doubt they suddenly got smarter and realized that, and even if they did like I said it is likely too much effort at this point.

The surface exploration is a different can of worms and would require far more effort to salvage into something that isn't plain awful. I wouldn't be surprised if the foolish quest to make it awesome procedural and seamless (which they probably intended but were unable to get it to work) is what dragged down the whole project.

 

[deuxhero]

Bethesda have no idea why people like their games. No one likes their main quests, their games are all about the life-sim elements, and the best thing Bethesda can do to facilite this is simply get out of the player's way. Instead they force the player into scripted, narrative-heavy scenes.

Imagine how much better Starfield would've been if the moment the player clicks "New Game" you are immediately dropped onto a random planet, in some random outpost, with some basic gear based on the class you chose. That's it. No forced dialogue or cutscenes or exposition. Just free to play and explore at your own leisure. You can choose to travel to a nearby space station or city to discover the world and main quest, or you could simply stay at the spot the game dumped you at the start and simply live out your character on that planet.

X4 actually has a few start options that are just that (the starts with the most story, Terran Cadet and Stranded, were both added in an expansion). It also added budgeted custom start option to one of the patches that lets you pick starting stuff (already know all the sectors of the core, got a gunboat instead just a fighter, already have a bit of renown with the humans) using points you get for doing unique things across your previous playthroughs to a limit (if you've ever made a million in a single transaction you can with an extra 200,000 credits, If you've done an quest of X type before you can start with a few knowledge points, if you've ever had a crewmember reach 4 stars overall rating you can afford better starting crew). The main reason this really works is the entire X4 economy is simulated (e.g., killing off a faction's miners will, in-fact, slow down or even stop their production if you get enough to choke their resource supply) so X at start of game is more powerful than X hours into it, but it would work fine in a more static world too. (It's a feature I'd love to have in Bannerlord)

 

[gurugeorge]

There's something kind of "weightless" about the MQ lines in Bethesda games.

Following on from my own thought, I remember I spoke about this before ages ago. It's something to do with the clutter and the interchangeability (or maybe it's a kind of "modularity?") of things and items in the game. It's a bit reminiscent of the feeling you get from MMO itemization.

It's difficult to describe, but it's easier to understand by contrast with something where everything around an MQ is handmade and bespoke, as in most top-down/isometric RPGs.

The - whatever it is, let's call it modularity - fits perfectly well with open world wandering, emergent gameplay and small interesting quests you stumble across, but when something is presented as an MQ or a major SQ in a Bethesda game, you kind of feel it's just a module that's been slotted into the game, or even something that's been procedurally generated (even if it hasn't been, even if it is in fact handmade, it still produces that feeling), and that the game could easily have had any of a dozen other MQs constructed from the modular parts - neither the characters nor the story stand out from anything else in the world (they feel sort of "itemized" like in an MMO), and it never feels special. They feel like MQs made from kit parts.